and if local and state gov't awarded contracts to "us" firms (which may not have anymore local workers then chinese firms, and which are probably buying as much offshore as the chinese firms) at a higher price,you have in effect
taxpayers subsidizing wealthy US owners
does that make sense ?
maybe it has to do with technology that just isn't available anymore in the us

many years ago, the state gov't in NY, as is typical oflocal gov'ts everywhere, poured huge sums into what was to become the Jacob K Javits Convention center (you may recall that JKJ's last official act was to run as a 3rd party candidate, splittin the vote and allowing the loathsome alfonse d'amato to get elected over liz holtzman)
anyway, as is the wont of local gov'ts they went for a technically ambitious, $$ building, that was sort of a giant tinkertoy - there were these huge metal hubs, and giant metal beams fit into the hubs
ordered some hubs from american vendor, hubs no good,cracked, had to go to japan....

anyway, if local gov't did award contracts to us firms, at a higher price, then can you imagine the howls of outrage from the liberal blogospsher ? cozy pols give away tax dollars to connected biz guys......

The mortgage lending poorly structured and approved from iregullar manner, then mortgage loan modification helps was denied to collect insurance so that guaranteed all these mortgages backed by treasure department. This is fraud to the nation and in jail should be all the responsibles for this trap long time ago.
I was one of this persons who lost their houses leaving all my dreams and of my family behind for a selfish, miserable and usurious reason.

I fall in line with all that is described in this article. I was screwed by countrywide, and BOA. I got a divorce a year after I bought my house with countrywide, and because my ex was "paying the note" it went into foreclosure. They then did a "modification" tacking well over 13k onto my principal when I was trying to save the home. They would not tell me what the 13k was for, even after I called several times asking for an itemized breakdown. They said that I couldn't have that information. When I said isn't that illegal? they said maybe, but they were not able to get me that information. Then after a few years of on-time payments i became unemployed for a month and a half. I got a job, and paid them consistently for two years, but was a month and a half behind for two years. In that time I had applied for a mortgage modification. I applied in September of 2009, Sent multiple copies of documents that they kept saying were not on file, even though I would receive confirmations that they received the paperwork. It took them over a year of paperwork going back and forth for them to deny my modification for lack of paperwork! The second they denied my modification they put me in foreclosure for being a month and a half behind, even though they could see that I was making consistent monthly payments. I then had to borrow money to reinstate my loan, and appealed the denial for modification, which they approved because they saw that I had all of the paperwork turned in correctly. They finally approved my modification, and put me in a "trial payment plan." In this trial payment plan they have already mis-entered my payment information, and have had to re-do a payment causing them to double charge me in one month, overdrawing my checking account.
Another thing- I found out by sweet-talking one of the customer service agents, that part of the 13k that they tacked-on to my principal for the initial modification, they were charging me $700+ for them to come out and mow my lawn over a period of 3 months when the property was not owner occupied. While the property was not owner occupied, my ex was mowing the lawn. This customer service agent was going to send me an itemized breakdown of the 13k, but I have not received it yet. He has "sent" it twice.

Romney is notorious to want unlimited guest worker Visas, never met a labor arbitrage he didn't like. Not to say that Obama hasn't been busy doing the exact same thing.

As this date approached, I thought I'd be feeling...I don't know what. But something bigger than I do. It dawned on me as I sat down to write a letter to a friend in the Midwest who was in Lower Manhattan on 11 Sept 01. In doing so I realized that my main sense was, what made this death of 3,000 people more dramatic than any other? And I had to conclude that it was because people reacted exactly as al-Qaida expected them to: something on TV, the images, and most of all the 24/7 coverage, repetition compulsion, and mythic narrative creation, would capture their minds and cause fear, paralysis, and infighting.

I think of the thousands of people in my waterfront area who died of asbestos and industrial accidents. They haven't even been counted. Nobody cares. Yet they all left families and friends and big holes in our lives and psyches.

It was that use of corporate mass media propagandizing against our own people by al-Qaida that concerns me the most. And what concerned me most today, and what I thought about while caring for various food-growing parcels during a heat wave was this:

Is it possible to wean people from their dependency on mediated information produced by anonymous corporations, whose people don't admit (or often even recognize) what their viewpoints/skews are?

I spent six years in grad school at a highfalutin' communications research and policy department, learning how to turn people into demographics, market segments, and information campaign targets for profit. So I'm a bit more cynical, and concerned, about stuff like this than a lot of people I meet, mostly because I know just how shaped, massaged, planned, and, yes, conspired mass media content is. Sometimes that's done passively, through a kind of profit-seeking inertia rather than active intent to commit mass mind engineering. But it has effects nonetheless. My schooling let me see how that works; I'm a minority in having had that schooling, and a further minority in having dissented from what I was taught I should do with that schooling.

It interests me how liberals in particular are so up in yo grill about obese children and obese adults. They don't seem to recognize that they, just like conservatives, have been on a steady diet of hyper-dense-energy junk content for the brain for a good 50 years now. And the highly portable new communications technologies mean that there is never a time when so many people are away from this matrixhiveborg of corporate content.

I've been calling myself a protectionist, and I'll continue to support 'protectionism', although what I am doing is simply opposing anti-Americanism. (Especially when such anti-Americanism is by our own elected politicians.)

It really isn't protectionist to push, for example, for Congress to enact a 15% Across-the-Board Tariff (ABT).

Here's why.

'Mo' explains the point in a comment at article currently linked in EP's links to "Trade Reform," as follows:

Actually [you] cannot even call [yourself] a protectionist because these trade agreements allow other countries to retain barriers so pushing for [equalizing barriers] is not protectionist.

'Mo' is commenting at Avoid Trade War? We’re Already in One! (Ian Fletcher, www.TradeReform.org, 29 August 2011)

Ian Fletcher:

Whenever protectionists like myself demand that the U.S. government do something to stand up for America in global trade, we are shouted down with the stern admonition, “You’ll start a trade war.”

I wish.

The reality is that nobody in America is going to start a trade war, for the simple reason that we are already in one.  Foreign governments understand, as ours does not, that international trade is an arena of national rivalry, and they play the game in their own national interests.  Our government is hostage to an outdated 19th-century economic theory of global harmony, and on this basis conducts our trade relations with blissful naiveté.

Am I saying that our policy is determined by a theory?  No.  It’s quite obviously determined by the campaign contributions of the multinational (aka “who cares about America?”) corporations who profit from it.  But it is this theory that makes their demands respectable.  All the money in the world couldn’t bribe Congress to pass a law requiring everyone to roller-skate to work; policy always requires some non-laughable justification.

Thanks for nothing, David Ricardo.  You’ve made a fine mess.  ....

At the end of the day, China cannot force us to do anything economically that we don’t choose to. ... [For example] we might simply restore the tax on the interest on foreign-held bonds that was repealed in 1984 thanks to Treasury Secretary Donald Regan.

Thus a certain amount of back-and-forth token retaliation (and loud squealing) is indeed likely if America starts defending its interests in trade as diligently as our trading partners have been defending theirs, but that’s it. The rest of the world engages in these struggles all the time without doing much harm; it will be no different if we join the party.

Until we do, America’s trade pacifism will simply continue to invite foreign economic aggression.

Excellent article by Ian Fletcher! And thank you to EP for linking to Trade Reform!

Fletcher is Senior Economist of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nationwide grass-roots organization dedicated to fixing America’s trade policies and comprising representatives from business, agriculture, and labor. He was previously Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a Washington think tank founded in 1933 and before that, an economist in private practice serving mainly hedge funds and private equity firms. Educated at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in San Francisco.

("Ian's writings do not necessarily represent the views of the Coalition for a Prosperous America.")

Link to TradeReform's webpage for Fletcher

Barry Ritholtz brought this to our attention, and it's just a scream, shows how debt is being passed and contagion is increasing, but done with lego illustrations.

Truly David Cay Johnston is a must read. He digs around in databases and the IRS and finds the most amazing stuff and that's because almost no one reads the tax code, at least the corporate tax code. I highly recommend his books, he points out some amazing loopholes. He also turned me onto how Washington D.C. as well as Wall Street, the more something is a rip off, the more complex and obfuscated it will be.

"Opting out should be an option." -- Odin

No, opting out should not be an option! Ask any actuary!

The only real option we here in the USA have is to throw all corrupt politicians out of the Congress, elect a third-party POTUS (or nominate Buddy Roemer in the GOP and/or Dennis Kucinich for the Democrats), enact a Judicial Reform Act to get rid of the current activist SCOTUS and also enact an Electro-magnetic Spectrum Allocation and Interstate Fiber Optic Reorganization Act to destroy the monopolistic corporate media. Also, American Monetary Reform Act, maybe along with a Gold Confiscation Act, if necessary (if too many of "them that have it" insist on making a nuisance of themselves). Then ... Social Security wouldn't even be discussed as a problem, just as part of a legacy of on-going democratic solutions.

Putting it another way: there are two options for the USA --

CONTINUING LEVERAGED TAKE-OVER OF THE USA BY INTERNATIONALIST (including FOREIGN-BASED) INTERESTS

or

REPLACE CURRENT MANAGEMENT with NEW MANAGEMENT FROM OUTSIDE THE USUAL Dempublicrat APPARATCHIKS

Freedom - use it or lose it!

Economics 101 - Reform Party

Don't short Third Party stock